AI bots battling each other has led to the wrongful removal of educational content from one of YouTube's most respected mathematics channels. 3Blue1Brown, known for its excellent mathematical animations and explanations, recently had videos taken down due to false copyright claims generated by ChainPatrol.io.
The channel's creator, Grant Sanderson, posted on Twitter:
I learned yesterday the video I made in 2017 explaining how Bitcoin works was taken down, and my channel received a copyright strike (despite it being 100% my own content). The request seems to have been issued by a company chainpatrol, on behalf of Arbitrum, whose website says they "makes use of advanced LLM scanning" for "Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies" I could be wrong, but it sounds like there's a decent chance this means some bot managed to convince YouTube's bots that some re-upload of that video (of which there has been an incessant onslaught) was the original, and successfully issue the takedown and copyright strike request. It's naturally a little worrying that it should be possible to use these tools to issue fake takedown requests, considering that it only takes 3 to delete an entire channel.